The Media Freedom Resource Centre is online!

Philipp Filipovski

The ECPMF and its partner Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso (OBC) developed an open platform to collect and give systematic access to information sources on media freedom topics. The "Media Freedom Resource Centre" was recently launched at OBC’s 15th anniversary conference in Rovereto, Italy.

The Resource Centre will collect and systematize current and existing news, reports and legal tools on media freedom.

The Resource Centre (RC) has the aim to gather and sort available online material concerning press freedom in any way. The fundament of this database are currently contributions of 42 main stakeholders, making their material like studies or other publications available to the public. All kinds of sources are collected in the RC, reaching from law texts to conference video footage. Thanks to Copyleft or Creative Commons Licenses, they can be freely accessed by everyone.

The strength of the RC lies in the systematization of the material available. By sorting the sources into different categories, for example by country or type of the source, the material can be easily accessed. In addition to this, smart links help the users to find exactly the material they need for their purposes.

Publications offered are not only academic sources, but also reports, books and practical manuals on media freedom issues. A toolbox links you to online trainings and other e-learning-material, monitoring tools to observe the state of media freedom in several countries, useful legal resources and support centres, where you can find direct support and protection. The multimedia section provides you with audio-visual data, e.g. presentations and info graphics as well as videos with interesting contributions from conferences, documentaries and interviews.

Crowdsourcing as strength

The Resource Centre is not meant to be a platform exclusively for media freedom specialists, but wants to be helpful and accessible to everyone with an interest in the issue. To best achieve this, from October 2015 to March 2016, OBC hosts a Wikipedian in Residence. In cooperation with Wikimedia Italia, he uses the sources of the RC to create or improve articles of Wikipedia. In return, the articles are part of the RC, thus connecting it to the mass of people using the encyclopaedia every day.

To constantly keep the RC growing, OBC and ECPMF do not only rely on their own expertise and partners, but on the support of the media freedom community: Every user of the RC can take action and share his or her content with the community. Through crowdsourcing, the RC can be constantly updated and collect as many sources as possible.

OBC and ECPMF invite everyone to use the RC, share it with their networks and participate to make it grow and thus strengthen media freedom.

Philipp Filipovski, Researcher ECPMF, carries out fact-checking, picture research and other editorial duties as well as translations from Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian.

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